Here's another mock-up that never went anywhere, but I like the idea. And half the point of having this blog component on my website is to show stuff I like that I couldn't otherwise add to my book.

The Polynesian Cultural Center is a tourist attraction on the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii. One of the great things about it is that you can experience the cultures of seven Polynesian nations in one day, all in the same place. This sticker sheet tip-in idea makes that point pretty well, I think. Unfortunately, it didn't go very far beyond my own computer screen, but such is the life of an ad creative. *sigh*

Hawaii, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, Samoa, and Marquesas all in one place.

I got included in a promotion for the Utah AAF Summer Kickball Tournament. I have to say, it's the first time I've ever been immortalized on a trading card. It's nice to have my picture on the same page with this group of advertising movers and shakers. Fun stuff. Thanks for thinking of me, Fluid.

As part of a recent pitch for the Utah Office of Tourism business, we came up with a promotion to send a couple on a year-long vacation to Utah. The point being, there's something awesome to do in Utah 365 days a year, thus marrying the winter and summer brands. The plan was to upload a video of a new activity every week to the 52-Week Vacation website and to promote it heavily through social media and TV. Unfortunately, we didn't win the business. But I stand by the idea.

As part of a campaign to promote a temporary exhibit featuring animals built out of Legos at Utah's Hogle Zoo, we shot a few TV spots on a super shoe-string budget. A special logo was designed to look like it had been constructed out of Lego bricks and we thought the end of the spots were begging to show a stop-motion build. Unfortunately, to do it right would've probably doubled our costs. The gif above shows the solution. I spent hours deconstructing the final artwork of the logo and Photoshopping it to look as if it had been shot in stages.

Have I mentioned I work at a small agency? We don't have a Studio department. I can't sketch stuff and have it happen overnight the way I used to. So I wind up doing a lot of my own heavy Photoshop work. As part of the promotion of the annual ZooLights holiday light display at Utah's Hogle Zoo, I spent some time turning a marquee style logo into a more 3-dimensional rendering to help emphasize the transformation the zoo makes at night. We used this on a landing page and Flash banners that allowed viewers to switch the lights on and off themselves.

There aren't a lot of solutions in politics. But here's my idea to pay down the national debt—product placement.

Think about it.

The State of the Union address is carried by all the major networks and the cable news networks too. What might a company pay for that kind of exposure?

In 2014 the going rate for a :30 Super Bowl spot was about $4 million. A :60 was double that. Granted, the Super Bowl beat the State of the Union in total estimated viewership 111.5 million viewers to 33.3 million viewers—ouch. But that being said, the top rated prime time show in 2013 was NBC’s Sunday Night Football, which had an average nightly viewership of 21.5 million. They charged $545,000 per spot. By that logic, with 50% more viewers, The State of the Union could fetch 50% more in placement revenue per product. At least. Factor in total screen time and an implied presidential endorsement (which admittedly may depend heavily on the popularity of the sitting President) and I think you could justify something approaching Super Bowl costs. Imagine Obama pausing to wet his parched lips with a sip of Pepsi.

Cha-ching.

Of course we’re only talking tens of millions annually, when it’s all said and done, which is ultimately just a drop in the bucket with our national debt approaching 17 trillion. But what the heck, at the very least it’s money that could go toward reviving the Death Star initiative.

Cocoa Metro is a dark belgian chocolate milk with little brand awareness. We wanted to help put them on the map by giving Facebook fans a chance to make their relationship with chocolate official. The idea was a fake post to timelines that mimics the look of Facebook relationship status changes. Unfortunately, after initial optimism, our programmers deemed it undoable. Crap.

As an intern at Fallon, I was given the chance to develop a print campaign for the Citi Simplicity card. The key benefit was no late fees. The awesome part was that we were the only team on the project. Our executions dealt with the many reasons you might be paying late. Much to my regret, the strategy as well as the media shifted out from under us. Too bad. I still like what we came up with.

Hard to tell in the sketch, but this man's eye glasses are igniting his bill.

A common part of a RadioShack brief back in the day was a bullet point about how RadioShack had stores within 10 minutes of 95% of Americans. While concepting one day, my writer and I came up with the idea of putting the consummate small-box retailer in an even smaller box—a vending machine. That way we could reach the other 5%.

From the artist's sketch book.

A few years later while walking through an airport, I found this. Well played, Best Buy.